Nick Clegg has dismissed the UK's push for sovereign AI as a 'slightly dishonest' debate, arguing that the country holds only 'marginal relevance' in the global tech landscape. Speaking to City AM, the former deputy prime minister and ex-president of global affairs at Meta criticized government policies that he says have left the UK far behind in the AI race.
Clegg's Critique of UK AI Ambitions
Clegg, now on the board of data centre developer Nscale, stated that 'no one in their right mind would ever train an LLM foundation model in the UK.' He added, 'Given our relatively marginal relevance and importance as a country in this great battle between China and the US, we all have to slightly grow up about what we mean about being completely British.'
Government's Sovereign AI Fund
His comments come just days after the government launched a £500m Sovereign AI venture fund, promising support for homegrown startups, access to supercomputers, and fast-track visas for researchers. Tech secretary Liz Kendall called it 'unlike anything government has ever done before.'
Policy Choices Blamed for Stagnation
Clegg attributed the UK's failure to build its own foundation models to policy decisions, particularly on copyright. 'Energy is too expensive,' he said. 'The IP copyright stuff – it's a perfectly logical decision for a government to side with content providers... But if you do that, you're never going to attract foundation model LLM developers.'
He described the UK as a country that 'stumbled out of the AI industrial revolution before it began,' now operating 'without a single steam engine we can call our own.' Clegg revealed he had tried to make his case directly to Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves a year ago but 'singularly failed to get them interested.'
Over-Reliance on US Tech
Clegg stressed that the broader sovereignty concern is real, citing an 'astonishing level of over-reliance on American tech.' He advocates for embracing open source models, including Chinese ones, which can run on domestic infrastructure without data links to US servers. 'The leading open source models are now all Chinese,' he noted, adding that such models can be customised and run in a sovereign manner.
Looking Beyond LLMs
Clegg's longer-term optimism focuses on 'world models' that understand the physical world rather than just language. He is an investor in a post-LLM research lab in Paris led by Yann LeCun and sits on Nscale's board, which plans to build a £14.6bn UK sovereign AI data centre in Loughton, Essex. 'You'd use an LLM to talk to your domestic robot – you would never use it to get your robot to walk around the house,' he explained.
